Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

position to Soviet Religious Policy (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 190-210; and of the revisions in 1963, 1966, 1969 and 1974 as appendix in Sawatsky, Soviet Evangelicals, pp. 475-487. The Russian translation of the latter lacks the appendices. 195 they had gained during the Khrushchev persecutions for Baptists being a missionary church. The Euro-Asian Challenge and Temptation In 1990 the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists was reorganised into the Euro-Asiatic Federation of ECB Unions. This in part preceded the break-up of the Soviet Union, yet there were further adjust- ments to a Euro- Asiatic Federation structure during the era of “Katastroika” (1992-1996). For a time it seemed possible that such a federation would actually disappear, executive secretary Val'ter Mitskevich relying for a few months in 1996 on foreign donations to pay the salary of the remaining staff. There are at least three larger questions to ask of this process. Was this a housecleaning process? Was it primarily a contextual adaptation to changing management notions? And if so, what was behind the adminis- trative fusion of headquarters staff and federation leaders? Since this was the era of the re-formation of the Soviet Union into independent Baltic states and the CIS, how do we tell the rise of nationalism story for evan- gelical churches in the FSU? It was widely assumed that among the church leaders were individuals who had compromised the church before the authorities; hence, for a new beginning, such persons needed to be replaced. Secondly, a younger generation of leaders soon took the view that the leadership that had emerged during “normalised socialism” lacked the courage, vision and moral capacity to be good leaders in an era of freedom for evangelism and mission. Part of the story of the recovery of the AUCECB between 1963 and 1979 had been the gradual elimination of distrusted leaders - those seen as too conformist or as betrayers - through a process of election from below, often forcing local authorities to accept a leader they saw as prob- lematic. One under-explored issue is the growing suspicion concerning how funds were received and dispersed. One initiative had been to bring Nikolai Kolesnikov, widely admired senior presbyter of Kazakhstan, to Moscow as treasurer, hardly because of his financial skills. Even then, the disbursement of funds by the International Department of the AUCECB was not fully under his control. During the first round of changes after 1990, most striking was the crea- tion of a federation headed by a president and three vice presidents with full executive authority, replacing the positions of general secretary, associate 196 general secretary and treasurer. For the first time, a Ukrainian, Grigorii Komendant, was elected president. His prestige initially was less than that of Iakov Dukhonchenko who remained the head (now called president'*) of the Ukrainia